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Resistance: Part I
Published in Alan Bleakley, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice, 2020
According to Foucault (1980: 144), biopower, or “biopolitics”, is a technology of power related to health that “has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize”. It is primarily recognized, as noted, in the face of modernity’s development of governmentality, where government and public bodies come to increasingly enter into the lives of citizens to shape and control bodies and their health. Biopower operating through the individual body is never free from the collective body of politics. People may take responsibility for their being or not, but they are monitored, surveilled and advised by the government. At the level of the individual, as happened across the USA in particular during lockdown, some individuals would perceive that their liberties were being stripped by government edict, and demonstrations for individual liberties, against the central government and state government lockdown measures, occurred. State governmentality met self-help as individual resistance. And then the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, following the callous killing (indeed, a modern-day lynching) of George Floyd, brought into focus how the biopower that is the policing of citizens’ bodies pushing to the limit the boundaries of the law can meet the biopower that is the public right to expression within the law. This set off waves of protest or resistance globally against perceived racial injustice. Biopower then pings around like billiard balls as states and individuals engage.
Tuberculosis, biopower, and embodied resistance in Madonna Swan:
Published in Joanna Ziarkowska, Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes, 2020
Madonna Swan and LaRose draw attention to similar processes of resistance to settler colonialism and the use of biopower in colonialist projects. Both consciously engage with a long history of Indian boarding schools and sanatoria and their role in creating a tuberculosis epidemic on reservations. Specifically, they illustrate how the tuberculosis epidemic did not unfold in a solely biomedical context; rather, it was artificially produced or at least facilitated through consistent decisions to neglect Indian health as documented in the Meriam Report. Both emphasize the corporeal dimension of settler colonialism and its biopolitical insistence of rewriting Indigenous bodies so that they become easily managed by and absorbed into the main national body. Finally, both texts consciously address questions about optimizing techniques of resistance to such practices and the identification of the most productive spaces for their realization.
Making Bodies Matter
Published in Jamie White-Farnham, Bryna Siegel Finer, Cathryn Molloy, Women’s Health Advocacy, 2019
To analyze the normative work of the well-woman visit, I draw on Foucault’s (1978) concept of biopower and its role in normalizing bodies. According to Foucault, power structures codify knowledge about bodies and mark them as identifiable, recognizable, and categorizable subjects. While biopower is often associated as a function of the government (see Britt, 2000; Lay, 2000), others argue that biopower refers to discourses that govern bodies more generally. Stormer (2015) makes the case that “government refers generally to ‘administration’ or ‘management,’ not exclusively to the state, and potentially involves all public or private institutions and normative practices” (p. 29). Biopower, then, is not performed by a singular political entity, but can be performed by people and institutions that “determin[e] higher principles of how to live, which are presumably embedded within the order of everyday things and beings, and then putting those principles to work managing the conduct of people” (p. 30). Biopower doesn’t work in a “top-down direction” on the public but “by enlisting them, often through communication, to participate in their self-management” (Scott, 2014, p. 110). Therefore, structures that govern how people live aren’t limited to the state; medical discourses also participate in biopower by structuring how people live and what people value.
Unintended consequences in traffic-light food labeling: A call for mixed methods in public health research
Published in Journal of American College Health, 2020
Michael W. Seward, Derek R. Soled
These unintended consequences were surprising given that literature on nudge theory has been positive overall; we could not find a framework to explain how traffic-light food labeling and choice architecture may lead to more harm than good, especially in college-aged populations. One possible answer can be drawn from the teachings of 20th century philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault coined the term biopower to describe a form of governmentality that operates to make a population live and behave in certain ways. More specifically, biopower refers to a regulatory power that uses numerous techniques subjugate and control “bodies.”7 Rather than adopting overt policy changes or disciplinary measures, the state regulates its population’s health through more subtle manipulation of cultural norms. Individuals then engage in self-surveillance and self-discipline, de facto subjugating themselves to certain ways of being as prescribed by the state. In the context of healthy eating, the state could use techniques other than conspicuous policy to make eating healthy the status quo, thus altering individual behaviors in the long term.
A crisis emerges: Lesbian health between breast cancer and HIV/AIDS
Published in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2018
The related concepts of biopower and biopolitics have come to be a central thematic in critical studies of the production and management of populations in the last 50 years.2 My use of the term “biopolitical category” is drawn from Michel Foucault's articulation of biopower as: “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and control of populations” (Foucault, 140). A biopolitical category, then, names one mechanism through which a certain population, in this case lesbians, comes to be counted under the purview of the state as part of a system of biopower. The execution of biopower is what Foucault calls a “ruse,” in that it creates docile subjects precisely through the production of ever-expanding categories of measurement. Put in the simplest of terms, what I am interested in here are the conditions that make possible the consolidation of the lesbian as a biopolitical category. That is to say, I am interested, first, in why it became necessary to count lesbians, so to speak, within the framework of public health. Second, I am interested in what events preceded the consolidation of the lesbian as a measureable category in our current biopolitical regime.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder: The Psy Apparatuses and Youth Resistance
Published in Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2018
For the purposes of diagnosis, the young person only needs to manifest behaviors in one environment, and this typically is in the home. Boys are more often diagnosed than girls, and young racialized people and young people who are living in poverty are also more likely to be diagnosed with ODD (Day, 2002; Mash & Wolfe, 2013). Left untreated, ODD is understood by the psy disciplines to increase vulnerability to later conduct problems that could make the young person vulnerable to more antisocial presentations and increased possibility of incarceration or, at a minimum, contact with the legal system (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2009; Harwood, 2006). Therefore, disparities with respect to conceptualization, surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment are most certainly a matter of biopower. Foucault defines biopower as follows: By [biopower] I mean the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species (Foucault, 2007, p. 1).